Make PDF Smaller

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe systems. Most of the times the documents, images that we want to upload in our website or post online are found to be very large in size and hence do not upload fast. This is where making PDFs smaller proves to be useful. By making PDFs smaller, we can reduce the file size considerably to almost 1/10th of its original size.

The document can then be uploaded to the website within minutes.

The main things to keep in mind when compressing PDFs are the resolution of the images, the types image (vector or bitmap), the fonts and how they are used, and the PDF version and compression level. Once the user is ready to manipulate these things, the document reduction process can begin.

There are a number of methods available to make PDFs smaller. The two major things to keep in mind when making a PDF smaller are removing objects and downsampling/shrinking the images. One of the methods used is the Save-As command in a PDF editor. Open the document in the PDF editor. Choose

File>Save As..Save it in the same name as the original, to overwrite it. Another method to make PDF smaller is by down sampling. It reduces the resolution of the images, and compression discards the irrelevant pixel data. One more effective way to make PDF smaller is with the PDF optimizer. Go to Advanced>PDF optimizer and choose Audit space usage button. It displays the bytes taken up by each element and its contribution to the total size of the document. With this information, one can select the most appropriate way to make PDF smaller.

The fonts used also play a huge role in file size determination as they can take up large amount of space in the document. Fonts of standard type, and which are non-embedded are preferred. Thus to make PDF smaller is a very easy task and can be performed by any ordinary person.